Wednesday, June 14, 2006

The Bush administration had planned to perpetrate torture even before it ordered the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; and it sought to exempt U.S. troops from international prosecutions. In the process, the United States has lost whatever moral authority it might have exerted throughout the world. [See Amendment to H.R. 1646, The Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 2001]

It was not too long ago that many people looked to the U.S. for leadership and not so long ago, our nation was still thought to be a democratic nation of laws, due process, and a prudent separation of powers. Now the U.S. is reviled; Bush is seen the world over as having betrayed his own people as he wages aggressive war against a nation that even he concedes had nothing whatsoever to do with 911, a nation about which he lied in order to justify his dirty, evil little war. The war on terrorism is phony.

And now, Bush proves everything that is said about him by refusing to close Guantanamo, by refusing to end practices of torture and rendition which he denies —even as he defends them.

In his final report, after he resigned as U.S. Chief Counsel for War Crimes, Jackson stated that “[i]t is not too much to hope that this example of a full and fair hearing, and tranquil and deliberative judgment, will do something toward strengthening the process of justice in many countries.” I believe that after fifty years it can be maintained with considerable credibility that these visions have largely come to pass.

Perhaps —at the time of the writing —"these visions" had come to pass. But thanks to the Bush administration's deliberate effort to undermine the very foundations of International Law, that important progress has been undone.

One rightly suspects Bush's motives. Even before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, before the attack on Afghanistan, Tom DeLay sponsored legislation that exempted U.S. soldiers from war crimes prosecution at the International Tribunal at the Hague. Did anyone in Congress stop to ask why? Were we planning to commit crimes for which we sought exemption from prosecution? Wasn't it clear to any thinking person what Bush was up to? Are we not the good guys? [Amendment to H.R. 1646, The Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 2001]

Clearly --the Bush administration was, in fact, planning to commit war crimes but wanted to make them legal if done by the U.S. I cannot possibly hope to document in a short internet essay the various circumlocutions that have been indulged by the Bush administration and its chief apologist: Alberto Gonzales. All, however, are intended to make legal the very acts that are prohibited by Nuremberg —but only if those acts are done by Americans. Bush is at least consistent in this respect: neither would he press for trials for non-Americans. He would simply decree their imprisonment and torture.

Nazis engaged in similar polemical campaigns. The results were tragic. So too with Bush who most certainly boasted of what can only be the summary executions of thousands who were most certainly murdered before they could assert their innocence:

...more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

This statement must be soberly examined; note that Bush refers to 3,000 suspects. Yet —he smirks that "...they have met a different fate." He boasts that "...they are no longer a problem to the United States...".

They were only suspects. Since when does the United States summarily execute mere suspects? Do we not know who our enemies are? What were the conditions of their detention? Why are we rounding up mere "suspects" —and not actual combatants? How is the execution of suspects justified under any standard, any morality, any legal system?

I am frankly surprised that Bush maintained the pretense when he has since arrogated unto himself the power to define terrorists. "Terrorists" are what Bush says they are. Bush is the judge and jury. Detainees are never charged and, by Bushs' own words, "suspects" are caused to be "...no longer a problem". Others are "terrorists" not because they are "terrorists" but because Bush —the decider —says they are. Some may be combatants. Some may be "evil doers". Others may be innocent. No matter. Bush —the all powerful decider —has thrown them all in the same wire cage, the same suicide factory.

Contrast Bush's remarks with those of American Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson uttered when America still had credibility and moral authority:

“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”

At the end of World War II, when even Winston Churchill espoused the summary executions of Nazi war criminals and Joseph Stalin favored mere show trials, it was the United States, under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, that insisted upon war crimes trials. Nazis would not be summarily shot merely because they were Nazis by definition or decree. Rather, they would be given a trial. Even Nazis would be allowed the right of counsel, the right to present a defense.

How can Bush hope to defend democracy —as he has claimed —when he subverts every Democratic principle that has been fought and died for over the last four hundred years? How can Bush justify his war of aggression against Iraq when he subverts the very "democracy" that he claims to bring them? How can Bush accuse anyone outside the United States of "...just hat[ing] freedom" when Bush is himself democracy's most insidious enemy?

If Nazis had engaged in the same disingenuous activities with regard to the incarceration and ultimate extermination of the jews, what moral authority could the U.S. have extended if its own policies differed not a whit in principle?

Bush should be careful not to indulge his delusions. Under his mal-administration, America is no longer a beacon of hope and freedom. Bush is reviled. He is not a liberator. Several polls suggest that he is seen as a threat to world peace and, in others, he is likened unto Saddamn Hussein. At least three issues and/or Bush policies have given the lie to Bush's rhetoric and U.S. posturing:

Tom DeLay sponsored legislation in which the U.S. unilaterally exempted U.S. citizens from prosecution for war crimes in the Hague; the measure actually empowered Bush to invade the Hague should an American find him/herself standing trial there on war crimes charges;

Bush unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of Kyoto because his base are lobsters denying that they are boiling even as they are thrown into the pot.

The Bush administration has sought over the last five years to exempt itself from widely agreed upon international conventions with regard to torture. But, of course, we are not torturing!

Bush is on the wrong side of the torture issue. Torture is morally wrong, prima facie, a priori. Moreover, torture is completely ineffective and unreliable; a victim of torture will say anything to make it stop. Torture inflames a victim and gives them yet another cause celebre. In many cases, if not all, torture legitimizes the opposition cause.

Bush will deny U.S. torture even as he defends it with lies and ex post facto rationales. Since nothing said by Bush on this topic can be believed, torture is, therefore, made policy for other, hidden, nefarious reasons. Those who practice it do so because they are heinously perverted; as "official policy" it can be practiced with impunity and with the blessings of the state. The source of American "torture policy" at Abu Ghraib and throughout the eastern european gulag archipelago is Bush himself, a man who is credibly reported to have reveled in blowing up toads with firecrackers.

I cite the case of Richard Topcliffe -Elizabeth I's "torturer in chief". He was a twisted, perverted lunatic who would have made Torquemada blush. He sent to Elizabeth his long, barely lucid ramblings, consisting of hysterical, psycho-sexual fantasies, hysterical religous overtures and graphic descriptions of what he had done to his "victims" for her Majesty's greater "glory".

I don't want to know how Bush's fevered brain thinks. I don't care! The source of his various sadistic perversions is of no interest to me. My only concern is getting Bush out of the Oval Office and neutralized so that he can't kill anyone else. For selfish reasons —the good of this nation and the world —I want to live to see Bush removed and replaced with someone who —if not a genius on the level of Jefferson or Madison — is at least someone who can be trusted not to undo their great work.

Is that too much to ask?

From Robert Jackson’s place in history:

Jackson drafted the original charges against the Nazis, outlining three categories of crimes for which the defeated Germans would be called to account. The first category included in the draft was the crime of aggressive war (Crimes Against Peace). Jackson considered this to be the most heinous international crime. He set as a priority that German aggression would be subject to prosecution, and he intended that the crime of aggression’s ambit be as broad as possible.

Jackson’s second category of substantive crimes was that of war crimes - crimes against the laws or customs of war. This category was more traditional, as international law had already recognized limits on the ability of nations to conduct war. These crimes had since been codified in The Hague and Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of civilians and prisoners of war during the course of international conflict.

The third category of crimes envisioned by Jackson were crimes against humanity - crimes committed in the course of aggressive war against individuals for racial, religious, or political reasons. Within this category lay the crime of genocide, the slaughter of millions of Jews and other ethnic groups. The substance of this crime, calling rulers accountable for their treatment of nationals within their borders, was revolutionary. Genocide had been defined in scholarship and political discussion years earlier, but Jackson’s vision extended beyond mere identification of atrocities. The International Military Tribunal would, for the first time, punish genocide as one might punish the murder of an individual.

GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- The US government routinely failed to give detainees at Guantanamo Bay access to witnesses who might have helped them prove their assertions of innocence, saying it could not locate the vast majority of the witnesses the terror suspects requested at special military hearings. But within a three-day span, a Globe reporter was able to locate three of those witnesses in the case of one detainee. The Globe found two of them in Afghanistan, and located a third in Washington, D.C., where he is teaching at the National Defense University. ...

NEW YORK In the aftermath of the three suicides at the controversial Guantanamo prison facility in Cuba last Saturday, reporters with the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald were ordered by the office of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to leave the island today.

A third reporter and a photographer with the Charlotte Observer were given the option of staying until Saturday but, E&P has learned, were told that their access to the prison camp was now denied. An E&P "Pressing Issues" column on Tuesday covered an eye-opening dispatch by the Observer's Michael Gordon carried widely in other papers.

He had listened in, with permission, as the camp commander gave frank instructions to staff on how to respond to the suicides. All four journalists left the island today and arrived in Miami about 12:30 p.m.

A Pentagon spokesman, J.D. Gordon, confirmed the order to leave the island this morning, but told E&P it was unrelated to the stories produced by the journalists, while admitting that Gordon's piece had caused "controversy." He asserted that the move was related to other media outlets threatening to sue if they were not allowed in. He did not say why, instead of expelling the reporters already there, the Pentagon did not simply let the others in, beyond citing new security concerns.

"All three have been screaming [about the order to leave] like it is going out of style," he said. A curt e-mail to reporters Carol Rosenberg of the Herald (who spoke to E&P about the expulsion) and Carol Williams of the L.A. Times mentioned a directive from the office of Rumsfeld, and stated: "Media currently on the island will depart on Wednesday, 14 June 2006 at 10:00 a.m. Please be prepared to depart the CBQ [quarters] at 8:00 a.m.''

Rich Bard, deputy world editor for the Herald, said "It was our hope that we could work out an arrangement with the Department of Defense to keep her in Guantanamo. We thought it in the best interest of our readers to have access."

J.D. Gordon, the Pentagon press officer, told E&P that Rosenberg and Williams had been invited to come to Guantanamo last weekend for the start of tribunals. Mike Gordon and Observer photographer Todd Sumlin, meanwhile, arrived to produce a profile of the camp commander, who hails from North Carolina. The suicides of the three detainees happened to occur in this time period and the tribunals were cancelled.

The reporters, with the approval of the base commander, covered the aftermath of the suicides, and interviewed attorneys who ripped the legal horrors for the inmates, few of whom have been formally charged with any crime. A lawyer who had tried to represent one of the dead men was accusing the U.S. government "of thwarting his efforts with bureaucratic maneuvers" and lamented that justice can never be done for his client now that he is dead.

After stories started appearing the reporters ordered to leave, on a hastily arranged military flight to Miami, over the protests of their editors.

Tom Fiedler, the editor of the Herald, wrote to the Pentagon, "Ms. Rosenberg arrived at Guantanamo and proceeded to report on the suicides with the full support of base personnel and with the direct knowledge of Gen. John Craddock, who arrived on Sunday. At no time did anyone state or suggest that Ms. Rosenberg's presence was unauthorized or even undesired.

"Neither Ms. Rosenberg nor The Miami Herald seek to remain indefinitely at Guantanamo nor to have exclusive or special access. However, we respectfully suggest that, while aspects of the suicides remain undetermined it is in the best interest of the DOD and the public that the news media be present."

The Pentagon spokesman told E&P that Rumsfeld's office was overruling any of the permissions from military at the base.Mike Gordon of the Charlotte Observer told E&P today he had not received the letter from Rumsfeld's office but had been told that he could leave Wednesday or stay until Saturday -- but access to the prison had been ended.

"He was doing a hometowner, a hometowner takes one day," J.D. Gordon, the Pentagon's press officer, said. "You would think that a man allowed down for a whole week would be a bit more gracious about it. Have the good grace and class to leave."

The Pentagon spokesman told E&P that recent activities surrounding the suicides of three detainees required heavier security and the removal of outside media."We told [the journalists] on Monday that we are in a difficult position," said Gordon, the Pentagon press officer. "We are trying to be impartial and fair." He added that pressure from other media outlets to be given similar access also forced the complete press ban. "We are between a rock and a hard place," he said.

He told E&P that Williams and Rosenberg were originally part of a 10-person media group invited to arrive Saturday to cover a military tribunal set for this week. But on Saturday, the tribunal, also known in the military as a commission, had been postponed following last week's suicides of three detainees. Press Officer Gordon said the Pentagon informed all 10 journalists on Saturday that they were not allowed to visit. All 10, including reporters from Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal, had planned to arrive via military aircraft.

But he said that Williams and Rosenberg arrived on their own, via a commercial aircraft, and were allowed to be on. Michael Gordon, who had also arrived Saturday, was allowed to remain for his story. "We didn't like it, we didn't think it was appropriate," the press officer said of their arrivals. "But it was plausible."

By Sunday, however, J.D. Gordon said he began getting complaints from other news outlets, such as Fox News, AP, CNN, and Reuters, claiming that their reporters should be allowed on the island if the three other journalists were there. "The other media started to have a mini-phone riot," he told E&P. "'Hey, why are they there?' We had a major issue on our hands for other media to 'either get them in there or we have to see you in court.'"

He would not identify which media outlets threatened legal action, but said more than a dozen news outlets called to complain between Sunday and Monday. Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of AP, said her outlet was among those who sought equal access -- but said legal action was never threatened. "We never begrudge other reporters being there as long as we can be there, too," she told E&P, adding that the military could have accomodated more reporters on the site. "The Pentagon makes lots of complicated logistical decisions that are more difficult than that one. We are not the most difficult problem for them to manage."

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, issued a statement today declaring, “If the United States wants to restore its credibility as a democracy in the eyes of the world, it should be inviting journalists in, not kicking them out. Our government insists it has nothing to hide, but its actions show otherwise."Still, J.D. Gordon said the decision was made that all of the media had to leave the island. But he denied any accusation that such expulsions were in reaction to any of the tough-minded reporting.

"No, totally not true," he said. "Some of the things [Gordon] wrote caused controversy, about changing detainees clothes and forced entry. But we are not into content management. The issue was that other media were threatening to take us to court."

Bard, the Herald editor, told E&P: "Our knowledge of some of the details is limited." When asked about the Pentagon's contention that other media outlets barred from the island had complained, he said that should not affect his own reporters.

The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which was representing the three men who committed suicide, released a statement today: "At a time when the administration must be transparent about the deaths at Guantanamo, they are pulling down a wall of secrecy and avoiding public accountability. This crackdown on the free press makes everyone ask what else they are hiding down there. This press crackdown is the administration's latest betrayal of fundamental American values. The Bush Administration is afraid of American reporters, afraid of American attorneys and afraid of American laws."

The emperor Marcus Aelius Aurelius Antoninus who reigned from 161-160 was the only Roman emperor besides Julius Caesar whose writings were to become part of the canon of Western classics. His Meditations are a loosely-organized set of thoughts relating to the stoic philosophy which had been popular among the better-educated citizens of Rome for some centuries.

It stressed self-discipline, virtue, and inner tranquillity. Aurelius was also a social reformer who worked for the improvement of the lot of the poor, slaves, and convicted criminals. Non-Christians in the Western World have often looked to him as a role model. He was also a fierce persecutor of Christianity, doubtless because he felt that the religion threatened the values that had made Rome great.

Aurelius was not an original or brilliant thinker, but his Meditations reflect well the stoic strain in Greco-Roman civilization. The emphasis on morality combined with emotional detachment is strongly reminiscent of Buddhist thought, with which Stoicism has often been compared.

Monday, June 12, 2006

Bush had planned to attack and invade Iraq even before he stole the election of 2000. The public record is replete with direct, verifiable evidence of this as well as coincidences of the truly GOP kind. To wit:

Bob Woodward —in "Plan of Attack" —described a Saudi government offer of some $1 billion to the Bush administration for what were called "...joint intelligence operations" designed to overthrow Saddam Hussein by April of 2002. [See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, Page 229]

Clearly —all the pieces had been put into place: the Saudi payoff, a "sweetener" to seal the deal, the pretext, the timing!

The Pretext

Bush's official terrorist conspiracy theory morphed into a world-wide campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, involving the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's MI6, and thousands of outlets throughout the American media. The lie became a chorus —Saddam Hussein was or had developed nukes and posed an imminent threat to the entire world.

The timing is unbelievably convenient. Bush now held in his hand the pretext he needed: the Niger yellow cake forgeries. The weight of evidence and GOP coincidence supports the conclusion: Bush knew them to be forgeries at the time. Else —why "out" Valerie Plame?

According to Vanity Fair, there were 14 instances —prior to the 2003 State of the Union Address —in which C.I.A. analysts, the State Department, or other government agencies and/or officials who had examined the Niger documents, raised serious doubts about the legitimacy of the forgeries and were rebuffed by Bush-administration. The Plame case proves that Bush would refuse to hear the truth; he would punish those who dared to tell it. The Bush administration would commit treason in order to shut up its critics and it would rewrite a sorry history to cover up its crimes against humanity and the people of the United States.

Bush would try to discredit his critics with timed and illegal leaks; but Bush himself would brazenly claim to have made the leaks legal because he —the "decider" —authorized them. The magnitude of these crimes upon crimes is hard to sum up in a mere paragraph or two, an article, or even a book. But should any American still doubt the stain left by Bush on American history, the following two paragraphs are essential reading:

The story of the Niger forgeries is definitely woven into the major Bush Administration scandals - the fake war intelligence, the AIPAC spy scandal, the Chalabi-defector manipulations, and it directly spawned the Valerie Plame scandal. When Plame's husband publicly called out the forgeries, Scooter Libby and others "outed" his wife as a CIA agent, more or less because they wanted to "play dirty" to defend fake elements of the war propaganda, such as the forgeries.

The great Meta-Story – the major narrative, the center of gravity of the past few years – is the "core reality" of why the war in Iraq started, and its interesting corollary, the Republican claim that "investigations will make us sad and hurt America." More or less, all along, the plan was to scare the shit out of America and make the Democrats appear weak. This was done by planting fake stories about evil foreign menaces, and as time goes by, more and more details about this essential backdrop to the 'War on Terror' burble up from the morass of this young, dumb century.

Among the many lies told by Bush about Iraq, the "Yellow Cake" story is the most damning. Unlike Bush's false claims about aluminum tubes and other plumbing, that Saddam was conspiring with Al Qaeda, that he was making chemical weapons in a beat up old trailer with a hole in the tarpaulin, etc, the "Yellow Cake" story is one of a deliberate intention to defraud, to hoax the American people and the world. This was not a mistake, it was a bald-faced lie! The war was not a response to terrorism, it was a capital crime. Bush knowingly intended to deceive and mislead.

But whatever term they use, at least nine of these officials believe that the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public.

It is not an innocent error; it cannot be attributed to mere faulty intelligence. Rather, this was faulty intelligence that was sought out for its propaganda value. This was fraud with lethal consequences. Not a simple mistake of judgement, this was mass murder! This was a war crime.

"This wasn't an accident; this wasn't 15 monkeys in a room with typewriters."

—Milt Bearden, C.I.A. veteran, station chief in Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and Germany, head of the Soviet-East European division.

Since Bush ordered the war of aggression against Iraq, tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed. This makes Bush guilty of war crimes. Much of the case against George W. Bush can be found in official documents —just as at Nuremberg —and in various verifiable items in the public record. Each death as a result of the U.S. invasion is, in fact, a capital crime under 18 S 2441. One day George W. Bush and other complicit members of his administration will be so charged.

The Crime of the Millenium

George Bush's war crime has been a disaster of unimaginable proportions. The war has cost hundreds of billions of dollars in "out of pocket" expenses alone. The final number will most certainly exceed several trillion dollars when disability payments, pensions, and liabilities are at last factored. By all reasonable standards, the U.S. is bankrupt, kept afloat by China, Japan, and Europe.

Bush's folly has de-stabilized the Middle East. Just as Ronald Reagan's vaunted "war on terrorism" sparked an exponential increase in terrorism during the time it was waged, Bush's war of aggression has made of Iraq a hot bed, a magnet for terrorist activity when there had been none in that country before the U.S. invasion.

Bush's war has forever stained American credibility throughout the world. No price can be put on credibility and no government can last long when nothing said by it can be believed. In the seventies, the label "Great Satan" may have been over the top. But what can be said to our detrators now that Bush has played into their hands and proven to the world that everything said by U.S. critics was and is true? If American credibility is not beyond repair, it is at least on life support. If it is resuscitated at all, it will take generations.

In the meantime, Greg Palast's new book speaks to the issue of motivation:

Greg Palast: Bush had a secret plan for Iraq’s oil. Make that, he had two, and I got them. It was not easy, let me tell you. The first plan that I found was crafted by the Neo-cons – Wolfowitz and the whole Rumsfeld gang. Their program for oil in Iraq was to sell off the oil fields. We have it in black and white. They called this privatization, which means slice, dice and sell. Of course, since Iraqis only have Iraqi currency, it wouldn’t go to Iraqis, right?

That plan was handed to General Jay Garner, our first vice counsel there. I showed him the secret plan and he said, “Yes, that’s it.” I said, “Why didn’t you implement it?” He said basically that he told Rumsfeld to take the plan and stick it where the desert sun doesn’t rise.

Greg Palast: They sent in Paul Bremer, whose sole qualification for the job was that he was managing director of Kissinger Associates. But the plan to sell off Iraq’s oil fields was blocked by something I didn’t expect – big oil, the big oil companies. They said: Listen guys, this isn’t how it’s done in the Mideast. You let the Iraqis pretend that they own the oil, and what we do is we have no-bid production sharing agreements. The key thing is to make sure – and here’s the kicker – make sure we don’t get too much oil.

I have the actual 323-page document drafted by big oil executives in Houston, working with James Baker’s people. Remember, James Baker represents Exxon Oil Company. He also represents the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. These are the guys drafting the plans – our plans for Iraq’s oil. By the way, why aren’t the Iraqis drawing up their own plan? That’s another issue. But the plan was that we don’t sell off Iraq’s oilfields. Rather they have lock-up agreements with U.S. oil companies. ...

Efforts to use former Nazis as spies led the CIA to keep mum about the location of criminals such as Adolf Eichmann.By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published June 7, 2006

WASHINGTON - Determined to win the Cold War, the CIA kept quiet about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose undercover anticommunist efforts in West Germany, according to documents released Tuesday.

The 27,000 pages released by the National Archives are among the largest post-World War II declassifications by the Central Intelligence Agency. They offer a window into the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence - and the efforts to use former Nazi war criminals as spies, sometimes to detrimental effect.

The war criminals "peddled hearsay and gossip, whether to escape retribution for past crimes, or for mercenary gain, or for political agendas not necessarily compatible with American national interests," Robert Wolfe, an expert on German history and former archivist at the National Archives, said at a news briefing announcing the document release.

In a March 19, 1958, memo to the CIA, West German intelligence officials wrote that they knew where Eichmann was hiding. Eichmann played a key role in transporting Jews to death camps during World War II. "He is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias 'Clemens' since 1952," authorities wrote. ...

AMMAN, Jun 5 (IPS) - These days, Ramadi is nearly impossible to enter. Against the backdrop of the Haditha massacre, IPS has received reports of civilians killed by snipers, and homes occupied with American snipers on their roof, while families were detained downstairs.

One man, who wishes to be known simply as 'an Iraqi friend,' met with IPS in Amman to describe the situation in Ramadi and detail recent events there as he saw them.

"To enter Ramadi (about 100 km west of Baghdad) you have to pass the bridge on the Euphrates and the electrical station for Ramadi. This is occupied by the U.S. troops. The checkpoint is there, the glass factory nearby is occupied by American snipers. Here they inspect cars and you will need more than four hours just to pass the bridge."

Reports from Ramadi have been few and far between in recent months, and always filed by reporters embedded with U.S. troops working in the area.

Witnesses interviewed by IPS in Amman provided a nuanced picture of the situation, one that is very different from the military focus of embedded journalists.

Their stories describe death happening any moment, without signals or warning. ...

The world increasingly fears Iran's suspected pursuit of a nuclear bomb but believes the U.S. military in Iraq remains a greater danger to Middle East stability, a survey showed on Tuesday.

As Washington campaigns to highlight the threat it sees from Tehran, the good news for the United States in a Pew Research Center poll of 17,000 people in 15 countries is that publics, particularly in the West, are worrying more about Iran. ...

WASHINGTON - The presence of U.S. troops inIraq is a greater threat to Mideast stability than the government inIran, according to a poll of European and Muslim countries.

People in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Russia rated America's continuing involvement in Iraq a worse problem than Iran and its nuclear ambitions, according to polling by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Views of U.S. troops in Iraq were even more negative in countries like Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan.

America's image rebounded in some countries last year after the U.S. offered aid to tsunami victims, but those gains have disappeared, the Pew poll found.

Iraq is one of many issues that pushes a negative view of the U.S., said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. ...

Sometime in 2000, reports Craig Unger in an exposé piece in the latest edition of Vanity Fair, a current member of Italy’s secret Service (SISMI) approached Rocco Martino, a former Italian spy who had fallen on hard times, with a deal that might make him some money. A woman who worked in the Niger Embassy, Martino was told, frequently sold stolen documents that Martino might be able to sell to foreign intelligence agencies. According to Unger’s article, Martino obtained a cache of documents from this woman in January 2001, which he promptly circulated in Europe’s spooky underworld.

Martino now believes he was set up in order to pass the documents along to various intelligence services in Europe and the US for the Italians without being officially connected to them. In his article titled, "The War They Wanted, the Lies They Needed," Unger describes Martino as having a reputation as someone who sold secrets to the highest bidders, sometimes even double dealing. He was the perfect patsy, he told Unger.

Indeed, the crux of Unger’s article is that Italian spy agencies, in collusion with ex-US spies with ties to the most hawkish neo-cons in the Bush administration, may have orchestrated the distribution of the Niger documents for far more nefarious purposes than making a few bucks.

As it turns out, some of those documents had an enormous impact on the course of world events. They helped start Bush’s war in Iraq.

Unbeknownst to Martino, Unger reports, the aging ex-spy had passed on the infamous Niger forgeries that purported to show that Saddam Hussein’s government had made arrangements with the government of Niger to buy 500 tons of uranium "yellow cake" ore.

Dossiers reporting the contents of the documents quickly made the rounds of the various intelligence branches. But, according to Unger’s investigation, between their surfacing in January 2001 and the fateful January 2003 State of the Union Address in which President Bush used specific information from the forgeries to make his case for war to the American people, the documents had been discredited on 14 separate occasions by CIA analysts, State Department WMD experts, foreign intelligence agencies, current and former US diplomats, and others.